Episode 224: Two Postcards

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This is the Memory Palace.

I'm Nate DeMayo.

A postcard from the road to Chancellorsville, December 2024.

Past the Church of the Messiah and the Zoen Baptist Church and the Faith Baptist Church across from the Salem Baptist Church, in the Home Depot, in the Chick-fil-A, and the Macy's that has seen better days, and the mall of which one could say the same.

Past the Long John Silvers and the Starbucks, and the Starbucks in the Barnes ⁇ Noble, past AAA pools operating on winter hours, Adirondack chairs out front, the same chairs in many colors.

Past vape shops and gun shops and pawn shops where you can buy the guns of people who needed money more than they needed guns at one point.

Past Battlefield Dental, past grocery stores, past El Piño, the family-owned taqueria by the Taco Bell, up from the Chipotle.

Past the appliance store, or maybe it was a place that sold convertible sofas or plush chairs that leaned back, but now houses pickleball courts.

Past the CVS and the CVS and the CVS.

and the McDonald's and the McDonald's and the McDonald's across the street from the Burger King.

Out past the middle school, home of the Mustangs, and the point where the commercial district yields to fields, blanched and frozen, and tracked homes just beyond stands of trees, a new community built where fields once were.

And out toward the battlefield, where 30,500 men died over the course of a week of fighting in the spring of 1863, as I am told by the Wikipedia page that lists the major battles of the American Civil War.

in descending order based on total number of casualties.

The fields give way to forest, to assign advertising lots where one can build homes in the woods, these woods through which armies, tens of thousands of men, once marched on their way to engage the enemy, to feign or to flank, 15.7% of them to die, which seems so high, but is nothing compared to Gettysburg or Chickamauga or Shiloh.

Out to the visitor center, closed today, to maps and plaques.

Earnest entries that speak of troop movements and tactics, but little of people.

And then an audio driving tour, so balanced and factual that it can do little more than guide you from field to field on a frigid day, where one can sit and stare through the windshield of a rental car and try to see the forest for these trees and fail to see men on the road to Chancellorsville.

A postcard from the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site in Anacostia, Maryland, December 2024

There's a tree by the walkway to this house in a hill, A tall evergreen, one of two, that you will not notice until you are inside the house, until you are up on the second floor by the bedroom where Frederick Douglass once slept.

And you are standing at the bay window at the end of the hall, the last of the late afternoon light coming through, cold and flat, a pewter gray that will give way before long, too soon to sudden nightfall, so early this time of year.

The tree partially blocks that view now.

It didn't then, when Frederick Douglass lived here.

Though it is still majestic, the tree and the view.

Looking through that window down the broad lawn, past the row houses, out across the Anacostia River, to the confluence of the Potomac, the District of Columbia spread out before you.

The Capitol, partially obstructed by the tree.

But not the Washington Monument.

You can see it clearly.

Frederick Douglass could.

the ranger from the Park Service will tell you.

It was being built when the Douglas family moved into this house called Cedar Hill in 1877.

He says Frederick Douglass, once enslaved, once watched the monument rise, marble block by marble block, from that window, or when sitting in a rocking chair in the long, low porch that stretches the length of the first floor of the house.

But there was no tree there then, because his wife was still alive.

Anna Murray, who had met her future husband, tall and handsome, Frederick Douglass, that mane of hair, the piercing eyes.

She met this man on the docks where she worked as a laundress.

He was enslaved.

She was not.

She sold her own clothes and her bed and gave him the money and stole a sailor's uniform so her husband could escape to freedom.

She was ill from the moment they moved into that house some 40 years later.

And she was sick every day for four years.

And then she died.

And they planted a tree.

A sapling to remember her.

It is so tall now.

In the front hall where the tour starts, you and five other people, three African-American women, two sisters and one of their wives, and two white men in their 60s, history friends, it seems, insurance executives you gather, who like to see Civil War sites together.

They might well know the added significance of the print on the wall by the door.

a scene cut out from a magazine and framed from the Battle of Fort Wagner.

But you might not.

And it will only be later, when you'll put it together, that of all the battles depicted in illustrations in Harper's Weekly or other magazines that brought the Civil War home, that this was the battle that Frederick Douglass wanted to hang in the hallway in his,

because two of his sons fought in that battle, with the 54th Massachusetts Infantry.

And what was it like for them, to be them, to have survived that battle a decade and a half before, and stand in their father's entryway, in a home that he bought breaking the law to do so as a black man.

But he could do so because he was Frederick Douglass.

What was it like to look at that illustration in the hallway by the door?

Maybe marvel at the gap between representation and lived experience, between history and memory?

There's a room off the hallway where you are told Frederick Douglass met with dignitaries in his capacity as advisor to presidents.

In his role as a community leader, as an ally to the women's suffrage movement, to any number of causes, And you will miss the names of those leaders, if they were mentioned at all, if their names mean anything still.

Because you are looking at the wallpaper, or rather the border above the wallpaper, that runs throughout the rooms in the first floor.

So different than the wallpaper below it, which is all staid and dignified and drab.

But up top by the ceiling is a band of bright yellow, with tropical plants, lush green.

Because Douglas had loved, you will learn, his time as the United States Minister to Haiti.

Loved that country, founded by people who had liberated themselves from slavery, was intoxicated by the thought of it, this place of possibility, in that moment in history.

Wanted that spirit in his home.

So he commissioned this wallpaper.

And so it is here in the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site, a bright flash amidst the gloaming of a late December afternoon.

And there is something to it, that half-dark, that helps you picture it, helps you see Frederick Douglass, in this place on this day, which is hard to do, which you are so often asked to do in places like this, in historic homes and battlefield parks from your car window.

But there's something about the half-light.

That's how it would have looked, with no electricity yet, oil lamps, candlelight.

It would be dark like this a lot.

And it helps the place feel alive in a way.

with the dead.

And so when you are led across the hall to stand behind a rope and peer into the family room, and you see a bookshelf built just a couple of feet off the ground, a single shelf, and you are told that Douglas built it so his grandkids would love books like he did.

So they would be able to see those books at eye level, pick them off the shelf themselves, and bring them to their grandfather so he could read them a story.

So they could sit on his lap in that chair over there.

So they could be read to by one of the greatest orators of the 19th century.

Maybe the greatest American there ever was.

There will be something of that, there in the air.

You can almost see it.

His bedroom is upstairs.

By the end of the hall, the bay window, where he watched the Washington Monument rise, watched the tree grow after his wife died in the room across the hall.

That was common then, separate rooms for husbands and wives.

There was another room too for his second wife.

a white woman who worked for him, which outraged people, which would divide his family for a while.

She would be the reason you would be in this house, taking a tour 130-something years later.

She made sure it was preserved, kept it as it was, almost everything in its place.

There are a couple of things missing though, you're told.

A broom handle that he would keep in his room to use to knock on the ceiling, to let his grandkids know that it was time to keep it down.

It is said of barbells.

that he used every single day.

To stay strong and maybe just as importantly to appear strong.

Because he was Frederick Douglass, people knew him at a glance.

And many of those people hated him.

And some would want to fight him.

It had happened for years.

And he would have to fight back, and he did not want to have to fight back.

But it was far better to win when he did.

Out back there is a small building.

A reconstruction, you're told, but it will not matter.

Because the idea that this shack, A building of stacked stones, a single room, a wooden roof, a chimney, not far from the house that he had bought at a time when men like him were not allowed to buy homes.

Just 12 years after men like him, human beings, were still allowed to be bought.

The shack was a room of his own.

This place he would go to read and be alone.

That if he was in there, you knew not to bother him.

Everyone did.

People came to call it the Growlery, because Frederick Douglass, historians think, They speculate, though, how could they really know what it was really like to be in the head of that real man?

They think Frederick Douglass suffered from PTSD, from any number of traumas documented or not, from his time enslaved, that he wrote down or didn't, but that somehow inscribed themselves in his body.

And he figured out at some point that to feel better, to push all of that away for a while, to calm himself, to reset his system or whatever, to cut through the pain and the overwhelm, to quiet the noise and get back to himself, whatever that meant, however Frederick Douglass experienced being Frederick Douglass.

He would go into that shack and he would growl.

Literally growl.

And he found that it made him feel better.

And there is something in all of that, there in the half-light.

The guide rushing a bit to finish the tour before he loses the light.

And he stands by the door by the framed image of a battle where a man's sons once fought.

And so he put a picture up to remember that.

a point of fatherly pride perhaps.

And he tells you, the tour guide,

of a night that Frederick Douglass came home, a cold one in late February 1895.

He was 77 years old.

And he came home in between meetings.

He was always at meetings, pushing causes forward, putting in the work.

He stopped home for a bit, changes clothes, check in, eat a sandwich, what have you.

And his heart stopped, and he fell right there.

And he died right there.

And you can almost see it.

This episode of The Memory Palace was written and produced by me, Nate DeMayo, in December of 2024.

This show is a proud, proud member of Radiotopia, a collective of independent podcasts that are listener-supported, that are artist-owned from PRX, a not-for-profit public media company.

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Thank you guys for listening this year, those who have been with me all along.

Thank you for sticking with the sometimes occasional or more occasional than usual

release schedule.

It has been a very busy year finishing a book and releasing a book.

For those of you who have bought the book, thank you so much.

For those of you yet to buy it, what are you waiting for?

I have to say, this thing's good.

It's beautiful.

It makes a great gift.

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